Forget “rare, well done or medium”: “CRAZY done” is the new barbecue standard.

Years ago, a Ben West designed high-efficiency wood and charcoal cookstoves that are now used by about 30% of Rwandans, and reduce the energy consumption of the country by about 10–15% (and, likely, also the amount of respiratory diseases).

This is great, really. Sincere thanks West for doing that! When he went back to the USA, however, things took a bad turn. Namely, West noticed that barbecue grilling with charcoal seemed to be dying, in favour of less-flavouring, but lower-hassle gas-powered barbecues.

Thus West, as you can read here, “designed the Spark Grill, which combines the benefits of charcoal with the convenience of gas”. How? Thanks to these “Briq” cartridges, made of wood and charcoal:

that you insert into a drawer below the Spark Grill, and then ignite at the press of a button.

The only downside is that the Briqs are proprietary and single-use only, as in “if Spark Grills goes belly-up and you can’t get more Briqs, your grill itself is, well, bricked”.

Proprietary pieces of wood and charcoal: copyright madness is really strong with with whoever buys one of those grills. No, not strong: not-well done.